I Close at the End

I Close at the End

January 9, 2026

The contemporary world is not witnessing the terminal gasp of a single superpower but the end of an era of unipolar dominance—a structural transition toward contested, layered authority; for the Philippines this means navigating between deterrence, dependency, and diplomatic agency under President Marcos Jr., with the risk that strategic hedging becomes strategic subordination.  

Premise and theoretical framing

The claim that unipolarity is ending reframes decline not as the collapse of a single actor but as the dissolution of a systemic configuration in which one state’s preferences and institutions set global norms. Scholarship since the late 2000s has argued that the economic shocks of the Great Recession and the redistribution of material capabilities have rendered the assumptions of enduring American primacy untenable. This is not a teleology of inevitable American collapse but a structural diagnosis: power is diffusing horizontally (new great powers) and vertically (regional orders, nonstate actors, techno-economic blocs), producing a pluralized architecture of influence.  

What “end of an era” means in practice

An era ends when the institutional scaffolding that sustained it—security guarantees, reserve-currency centrality, alliance networks, and normative leadership—no longer reliably produces preferred outcomes. The result is contested governance: overlapping orders, transactional alignments, and episodic cooperation. The political psychology of decline matters less than the functional consequences: allies face greater uncertainty, adversaries exploit ambiguity, and middle powers gain leverage through balancing and bandwagoning. The normative claim that the U.S. will simply “breathe its last” is therefore misleading; rather, we are watching the reconfiguration of authority across multiple domains.  

The Philippines at the crossroads

Manila’s predicament exemplifies the dilemmas of states embedded in a waning unipolar order. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration has pursued a dual-track strategy: deepening defense ties with the United States while seeking to de-escalate tensions with China—an attempt to preserve deterrence without provoking confrontation. Yet this balancing act is fraught: enhanced military cooperation (including expanded rotational access and interoperability) can entangle the Philippines in great-power competition, while economic and diplomatic rapprochement with Beijing risks eroding sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.  

Critical assessment: agency, risk, and illusion

Three critical points follow. First, agency is constrained: the Philippines’ capacity to convert multipolar flux into strategic autonomy is limited by material asymmetries and domestic governance deficits. Second, risk of instrumentalization is real—both great powers may instrumentalize Manila for broader strategic signaling, reducing Philippine policy space and increasing the probability of being drawn into crises. Third, domestic politics matters: elite preferences, patronage networks, and institutional weakness shape foreign-policy choices, often privileging short-term gains over long-term strategic resilience.  

Concluding synthesis and policy implications

If the epoch of unipolar dominance is ending, the Philippines must move beyond binary hedging. Conclusive policy requires three pillars: (1) strategic diversification—deepening ties with multiple partners beyond the U.S. and China to build redundancy; (2) institutional strengthening—investing in defense, maritime governance, and diplomatic capacity to translate partnerships into capability; (3) normative entrepreneurship—using ASEAN and multilateral fora to shape rules that protect small-state interests. Marcos Jr.’s current posture—simultaneous rapprochement and alliance-deepening—reflects pragmatic realism but risks becoming reactive rather than generative of a stable middle-power strategy. The end of unipolarity is not a catastrophe for the Philippines if it is met with deliberate policy that converts systemic uncertainty into diversified opportunity rather than strategic dependency.

Amiel Roldan's curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational. 

Amiel Gerald Roldan   

I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.    

please comment and tag if you like my compilations visit www.amielroldan.blogspot.com or www.amielroldan.wordpress.com 

and comments at

amiel_roldan@outlook.com

amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com 

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan: a multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.

Recent show at ILOMOCA

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